Mimetic Workshop: Studio Still Lifes of Fiona Ackerman and Kelly Lycan

×

Expand

Photos courtesy of artists.

Fiona Ackerman and Kelly Lycan

(left to right) Fiona Ackerman, Still Life with Action (2013), oil on canvas, 61 cm x 91 cm. Kelly Lycan, Rumination Three, Still Life (2014), installation view (cropped) from Autobiography for No One, SFU Burnaby, various materials.

There’s something about an artist’s studio that incites our curiosity—the opportunity to glimpse behind the scenes, to encounter the free play and struggle of the creative act, and to gain insights about the art and the artist. Yet looking around, one might say that we live in a “post-studio” era of artmaking. A growing number of artists choose to work from their portable computer at a café, an office space, a kitchen table, or a string of temporary international artist residencies.

While the where of artmaking is changing, the space and material life of the modern artist’s studio has increasingly become the subject of art in the twenty-first century. Vancouver-based artists Fiona Ackerman and Kelly Lycan both investigate this romanticized/de-romanticized space of the nineteenth and twentieth century. They do so by creating still life-like compositions of the fleeting images, icons, and materials of artmaking within their own studios and in relation to the studio environments of other artists.

In the work gathered together for this exhibition, Ackerman and Lycan collapse the boundaries between the artwork, artmaking tools, and the vitrines or frames in which they are displayed. Ackerman’s paintings reimagine the found scenes and scenarios of peer artists’ studios such as Ron Moppet, Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, and Jessica Eaton. Lycan’s voluptuous 3D sculptural arrangements borrow from photo documentation of famous modern artists in their studios such as Constantin Brancusi and Louise Bourgeois. With these studio still lifes, Ackerman and Lycan break down the distinction between the model or sketch and the final work, drawing attention to the process as art.

Join us for an artists' talk with Fiona Ackerman and Kelly Lycan at 6:30pm on Saturday, September 17. The opening reception follows at 7:30pm.